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August 2018

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Marxism and Marriage By David Solway

By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/marxism_and_marriage.html

In its centuries-long efforts to dismantle the load-bearing structures of traditional and classical liberal society, Marxist dogma in its various forms – communism, socialism, neo-Marxism, Cultural Marxism – has embarked on a sustained campaign to weaken and ultimately to abolish the institution of marriage as it has been commonly understood since time immemorial. The dissolution or misprision of marriage, as a contract between a man and a woman committed to raising a family and recognizing its attendant responsibilities, is a prerequisite for the revolutionary socialist state in which the pivotal loyalty of the individual belongs to the sovereign collective, not to the family.

Advocacy and legislation that sunder the intimate love between a man and a woman, that deprive children of male and female parental role models, that compromise the integrity of the family and that dissolve the purpose of marriage as a guarantor of cultural longevity are indispensable strategies essential to realizing the left’s master plan. Dismissing the nuclear family as an archaic and repressive arrangement whose time has passed, the state would then operate in loco parentis.

The problem for the left is that the family is a traditional dynamic that precedes and eclipses the tenure of the authoritarian state, not only because it encourages a prior allegiance, but because it allows for the retention of inheritance and property rights within the generational unit. This is anathema to the Marxist vision of, in historian Jacob Talmon’s phrase from The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, the “all-property-owning state,” a function of “political Messianism.” The Marxist offensive against marriage may be seen, in part, as the ideological version of a corporate takeover.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Barbara Jordan on Impeachment By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on August 17th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/barbara_jordan_on_impeachment.html

With the constant cries for impeachment that swirl around Donald J. Trump, it is incumbent upon us to remember the wise and reasoned words of Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who on July 25, 1974 gave an eloquent and dispassionate speech concerning the impeachment hearings against then-president Richard M. Nixon.

It behooves us all to bear in mind Jordan’s words today. Even though she reminds the nation that in 1787, when the Constitution was completed, African-Americans like herself were “left out,” she also explains that “through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision,” she was finally and irrevocably included in “we, the people.”

Thus, she firmly asserts that her “faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total.” She refuses to “be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution” as it concerns “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men.”

In the strongest of terms, Jordan asserts that “the jurisdiction comes from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” In fact, “it is a misreading of the Constitution, for any member here to assert that for a member to vote for an article of impeachment means that that member must be convinced that the President should be removed from office.”

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Crazy Rich Asians – A Review By Marilyn Penn

By on August 17th, 2018

Under the guise of being a reversal of the classic Cinderella story, Crazy Rich Asians gives us a super-smart, pretty Chinese-American woman who is a professor of Economics at NYU in love with a super-smart, handsome Chinese man from Singapore. He has to go home to be best man at a wedding and wants to take her along to meet his family. When they get there, she discovers that he forgot to mention that he is the scion of the Chinese Rockefellers – the wealthiest family with the best real estate, most lavish parties and best known name in that part of the world. Of course she cares only about true love, not money.

Our heroine is the daughter of a single mother – both women climbed their respective ladders of success through hard work and determination. Contrast this with the caricatures of vapid Chinese society women of Singapore who live only for conspicuous consumption of clothes, jewels, homes, plastic surgery and slavish imitation of western excess. Even though this movie belongs in the typical rom-com genre, this caricature of the wealthy class is genuinely offensive, particularly at a time when we are not allowed to spoof other minorities and are currently obsessed with parity in film opportunities for minority women. Are Chinese women excluded from this category because they tend to be well-educated, self-directed, ambitious and successful whenever there’s an open opportunity? Are they like the majority Asian students at Stuyvesant who are to be denied entrance in order to share the limited academic space with students without their work ethic who demand entrance based on the color of their skin?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Speak No Evil about Islam Edward Cline

By on August 17th, 2018

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

Speak no evil about Islam. Or else your so-called allies will roast you and call for your genuflection to political correctness, or insist that you audit a diversity course and absorb some sensitivity instruction. You will be tested upon completion of the course. But nodding off during a diversity lecture would also be offensive, too.

When you mock Muslims or their dress, you automatically mock Islam. Muslims adhere to Islam. If you say a Muslima looks like a bank robber or a mail box in a burqa, you are making a joke about Islam. But there is no humor in Islam.

Likewise, if you acknowledge that Pakistani Muslims are responsible for the unending rapes of white British girls, you will be charged with Islamophobia. You may even be seized on the street and tossed into prison, as Tommy Robinson was.

Boris Johnson, former British Secretary of State, and Labor Member of Parliament, Sarah Champion (for Rotherham), learned too late the negative consequences of freedom of speech in an authoritarian culture.

Champion apologized for her remarks about the Muslim rape gangs in her constituency and resigned from her party’s “shadow cabinet. “ All she said did was make a remark in a newspaper article about the gangs, in which she spoke of the “common ethnic heritage” of the men involved in the town’s sexual abuse scandal. “There. I said it,” she wrote. “Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?”

The “common ethnic heritage” of the rapists is that the rapists are Pakistani, thus missing the fact that they are Muslims. The rapists could just as well be Afghani or Sudanese or Somali.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION

By on August 17th, 2018

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.”

Allan Bloom (1930-1992)

The Closing of the American Mind, 1987

With ten grandchildren, the two oldest of whom will be off to college in the fall of 2019 and the youngest only eight years behind, the state of higher education has been on my mind. Much has been written about the need for greater emphasis on STEM classes – that China and India outstrip us in graduates each year in those fields. We read of cryptocurrencies and cyber theft and recognize the need to understand the former and thwart the second. There are students talented in these fields, and they should be encouraged. Less, however, has been written and said about the decline in humanities and the concomitant attenuation of morals, values and character that are their progeny. When a student at Morehouse College in 1947, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote for the college newspaper: “The function of education is to think intensively and critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

No country in the world has colleges and universities so well endowed, and so highly regarded as does the United States. Yet, too often, university administrators see their job as letting students design faddish majors that reflect a cultural-relevancy, advocating diversity in all ways, excepting ideas and preparing students for what is their view of a multi-cultural and globally-competitive world. There have been consequences.

One is the politically-correct model they follow. Students are deprived of needed contrary and, at times, uncomfortable, speech and opinions. Thus, there is no open and free debate. Insularity in a world of seven billion people, awash with myriad philosophies and political system, does little to encourage curiosity, increase understanding, reduce arrogance and hone rhetoric. Another consequence is an emphasis on STEM that supersedes humanities. Certainly, we need students to use their creative talents to invent new products and services, but we also must consider the consequences, the “whats” and “whys” of their creations. Why is it needed and what might be its longer-term effects? Much of life is learning to balance and temper the proven versus the unproven, dreams from reality. Humanities help. History teaches perspective. Literature provides insights. Philosophy allows for nuances. Religion makes us think beyond ourselves. Students need to consider all sides of an argument, even to question the wisdom and motives of their instructors and professors. When 90% of the teaching and administrative staff is of one political mind-set, prejudice sets in. And, as Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in National Review, “…bias is a force multiplier of ignorance.” Why, for example, should trigger warnings and safe rooms be necessary if the cloistered student is to become an unsheltered working woman or man? Do such actions prepare them for the world, or do they only offer cocoon-like protection for the duration of their time at university?

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